Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy

Mulla Sadra on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition

Ibrahim Kalin

first full-fledged study of Mulla Sadra's theory of knowledge

Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy

Mulla Sadra on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition

Ibrahim Kalin

Description

This study looks at how the seventeenth-century philosopher Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, known as Mulla Sadra, attempted to reconcile the three major forms of knowledge in Islamic philosophical discourses: revelation (Qur>'an), demonstration (burhan), and gnosis or intuitive knowledge (', Mulla Sadra bases his epistemological considerations on a robust analysis of existence and its modalities. His key claim that knowledge is a mode of existence rejects and revises the Kalam definitions of knowledge as relation and as a property of the knower on the one hand, and the Avicennan notions of knowledge as abstraction and representation on the other. For Sadra, all these theories land us in a subjectivist theory of knowledge where the knowing subject is defined as the primary locus of all epistemic claims. To explore the possibilities of a

Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy

Mulla Sadra on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition

Ibrahim Kalin

Table of Contents

1. The Problem of Knowledge and the Greco-Islamic Context of the Unification Argument2. Mulla Sadra's Theory of Knowledge and the Unification Argument3. Sadr?'s Synthesis: Knowledge as Experience, Knowledge as Being